


be like water

by synecdochic



Series: gedulah [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, Disability-Aware Sex, Exhibitionism, F/M, Imported, Incompatable Sexual Orientations, Vaginal Fingering, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-02
Updated: 2009-09-02
Packaged: 2018-07-10 11:24:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6982756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synecdochic/pseuds/synecdochic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel can't sleep, so he goes walking through the house in the wee hours. Turns out he's not the only one who can't sleep: Cammie and JD are in the middle of something in the living room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	be like water

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally [posted](https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/345417.html) 2009-09-02.)
> 
> This is an outtake from the series proper -- ivorygates and I were writing the main story totally out of order, and I was noodling around vaguely in the middle and took a detour into porn. After I finished it, though, we both realized that if we left it in the story (at the place it would have had to go) it would have precluded us getting to where we wanted to go later: Daniel, having witnessed/experienced this, would have dug his heels in and balked at doing what we needed him to do. 
> 
> So, technically speaking, this isn't canonical for the series (which makes it an AU of an AU of an AU of an AU, and at this point we really should just throw up our hands and start drinking heavily). If it were canonical, though, it would be set about six months after Daniel moves in with Cammie and JD: Cammie has been inviting herself into Daniel's bed to utterly-chastely snuggle with him on nights when JD decides sleep happens to other people, but she's just been passing it off as not wanting to sleep alone (which is also the truth): they haven't started having sex with each other yet. (Yet.)

Daniel's room isn't stuffy -- he doesn't think there's a single room in this house that is, or could be, uncomfortable -- and he's neither hungry nor thirsty, not precisely, but he's _restless_ ; it's two in the morning and he knows it's one of the white nights, where he won't be able to sleep until dawn's already peeking over the horizon, and there really isn't much point in sitting around waiting for what dreams may come when the dreams don't show any sign of catching a clue and showing up already. He stares at the screen of his laptop for about fifteen minutes, not seeing a word of the file he's allegedly reading, before he gives up and admits that things aren't working. 

The library is his best choice on nights like this; he can lose himself in its stacks without question, if nothing else than in the sheer joy of exploring it, and so he pulls on a robe (the public spaces of the house are kept at near-arctic temperatures after everyone else in the house can be presumed to have gone to sleep; it's not so much an energy-saving measure, Daniel thinks, as the fact that JD is the person most often likely to be up all night, and JD likes the ambient temperature close to freezing) and tiptoes out into the hallway. The house is silent, and so Daniel keeps his footsteps silent as well; the soundproofing is excellent, and intellectually he knows there's no way he'll wake the others just by walking (no creaky floorboards here; JD wouldn't stand for them), but knowing something intellectually and knowing it in the portion of his mind that governs his instinctive behavior are two entirely different things. 

He's just gliding past the door to the living room, though, when he hears a voice, soft and breathless and indistinct, and he realizes he's not the only person awake after all. He's just about to make his footfalls a bit louder, a touch more deliberate -- he knows better than to move too quietly around _anyone_ in this household -- when he registers the sound that follows it.

It's a moan. Of pleasure, not of pain, and the words that follow it are just as muffled, but Daniel strains his ears to hear, and it's Cammie's voice. "If you make me wake anybody up, I'm gonna _kill_ you --"

She sounds breathless. She sounds _gorgeous_. Daniel knows that tone, would know it anywhere and in anyone; it's the sound of a woman five minutes from orgasm and trying to hold back her cries. He can feel the tips of his ears heating, and he _knows_ he should turn and tiptoe back to his room, give her privacy in her own living room, but curiosity killed the cat and he can't help wanting to know who it is making her make those sounds.

(It's a stupid thing to wonder. He's just having a hard time believing logic.)

Sure enough, the low laughter that follows her words is deeper, but just as familiar. "It's past everyone's bedtimes. Including yours, I should add." Whatever JD does to punctuate that sentence makes Cammie gasp again, ragged and half-voiced, and Daniel's ears are burning and his cheeks are heating up and he couldn't drag himself away from this with a _crowbar_. "Are you saying you want me to stop?"

"You stop right now and they'll never find your body," Cammie says, her voice threaded through with bright desire. "God, yeah, _there_ \--"

There's absolutely no question about what's going on, twenty feet away from him, but that doesn't answer a single one of Daniel's questions. And he knows he's going to hate himself in the morning for this invasion of their privacy (of their _home_ ), but he takes that last step forward anyway, silently, just enough to let him see around the edge of the doorframe while he's still in shadow. The room is dark, lit only by the softest of glows from the baseboard lighting and a spill of brighter light from the kitchen doorway, but there's still enough ambient light for him to see the scene before him. He knows it wasn't meant for his eyes, but he can't help looking anyway.

Cammie is sitting in the armchair, not on the couch where she usually makes herself at home, and her thighs are hooked up and over the arms of the chair: gloriously bare, her ink on full display, blood-red and jet black standing out against the neutral dove-grey of the fabric upholstery. Daniel can see her house-pants, tossed over the coffee table; she's still wearing the tank top she had been wearing earlier, but it's pushed up to bare her breasts, nipples wine-dark and taut. JD is kneeling before her, hair loose, wearing only a pair of shorts, his ink blending into the shadows of the room and making it seem like the unmarked skin is the only skin that exists, like his back and shoulders are engraved by negative space. Daniel can see them both in three-quarters view; he can't see either of JD's hands, and JD's body occludes Cammie's upper thighs and her sex, but he can see everything else he might possibly want to.

"Shh," JD says, soft and reassuring, and Daniel watches as he turns his face, kisses the inside of her thigh. "Come on, sweetheart, just let go for me."

Cammie lifts her right hand up from where it's been clutching the chair's arm, lets it fall on the crown of JD's head and tangles her fingers in his hair. As Daniel watches, a ripple runs through her back, starting at the base of her spine and permeating outward, a soft swelling of desire; she follows it with another gasp, full of quiet wonder, halfway on the way to being a laugh. "We got a _bed_ , you know," she says. 

He can tell she's trying to keep her voice down; the rasp tucked away in the edges and corners of her words stirs something in the pit of his stomach, the backs of his knees. He can see her head tilting back, the long lean line of her throat bared to the ceiling, her scars -- the usually-pale-white tracheotomy scar across the base of her windpipe, the thick raised rope trailing down her chest between her breasts -- flushing barely two shades lighter than her nipples. She is beautiful, like an ancient goddess; men should build shrines to her.

His head is swimming, and it takes him a moment to realize that he needs to remember to breathe. Not for any of the reasons JD has been painstakingly drilling into his head, over and over: he's simply forgotten the process of respiration, overwhelmed by the tableau he's faced with. He shouldn't be watching.

He can't turn away.

"Yeah, we do," JD agrees, in between trailing the lightest of kisses down the line of her inner thigh. "And you're more comfortable sitting up for this. And I know all about your people-possibly-watching kink." 

JD's shoulder flexes, shifts; as he moves his lips past her knee, as far down along her calf as he can reach without leaving his knees while she still has her legs canted over the chair's arms, he moves just enough that Daniel can see Cammie's sex, the figleaf of JD's head lifted away. Daniel's practical mind notes that someone thought to put a towel beneath her hips. The rest of him is too busy entranced by the sight of JD's hands moving against her skin: his left hand's thumb lies motionless against her clit, while three of his right hand's fingers curl into the beauty of her glorious body, deep and full. 

The pace he has set -- the pace Daniel can see, JD's arm twisting, JD's fingers caressing her with utmost care -- is slow like syrup pouring, like the lazy drawl of Cammie's own voice on an unrushed morning, like the way sunshine feels on sand. As Daniel watches, JD arrives at the apex of his reach, risen on his knees and straining for it, and then begins to work his way back down the triangle of her thighs. His thumb slides down to the base of his other three fingers, brief and teasing; the light from the kitchen glints off the slick wetness of her skin, and Daniel has just enough time to see JD's thumb return to her clit, stroking her with what looks like playful torment, before JD's kisses reach the point where he eclipses Daniel's view once more. 

"I don't have a -- oh _God_ , you _bastard_ , _God_ I'm gonna kill you --" She's half laughing, half gasping; her fingers tangle in his hair and _pull_ , and he's laughing too. They move like old familiar lovers, two halves of the same whole, the most recent iteration of a dance dating back to the dawn of time and before, made manifest in this set of flesh upon which Daniel's eyes are trained. 

_Male and female He created them,_ Daniel thinks -- but no; male and female they might be, but JD's preferences don't fit into that binary -- he's been told that, more than once -- and Cammie is gloriously, unmistakably _woman_. The evidence of his eyes has been disproven hundreds of times over the years, but even he couldn't dream of something like this, something so wholly pure and innocent, impish and erotic all at once, thousands of years of human instinct and a decade of boundless love all funneled into these two care-worn bodies before him.

JD's mouth reaches the crux of her thighs and Cammie's back arches again, her _mons veneris_ rising to meet him as she fists his hair in both hands and uses it to pull his mouth down against her. "I don't have an exhibitionism kink," she manages, her voice shivering and shuddering with the pleasure she's taking from him, and the words slide and pulse through Daniel's ears like they have heartbeats of their own: her dialect puts the voiceless palatal fricative in the middle of 'exhibitionism' instead of the voiceless glottal fricative, shading into a voiceless postalveolar fricative; the voiced alveolar fricative is apical, not laminal, the bright thread of her high vowels carrying her words along on the top of a wave to end in those two crisp, clear velar plosives that ring through the room, far louder than they should be in Daniel's ears --

He's using his intellect to distract himself again, distance himself from the immediacy of the scene being played out before his eyes (although not for his benefit; he knows without being told that neither of them are aware of his presence, so wholly focused on each other, on _Cammie_ ). He knows he should back away, turn his eyes from the moment he's stumbled onto, their mutual glorification of Cammie's pleasure, her desire. He knows he should give them their privacy, allow them their moment, allow them the solitude they already presume they have. To do otherwise is inconceivable. Unforgiveable.

He can't do it. He can't tear his eyes away. And his fascination isn't sexual or erotic -- no, apply JD's honesty to this, as well: his fascination is only _partly_ erotic; the totality with which they are both focused on Cammie's body is one of the most erotic things he's ever seen, even when he can only see a fraction of the way they're moving together -- but something else entirely, something that tightens his throat and leaves his chest feeling paradoxically both cramped and vast at once. 

It's love. Daniel has never doubted, even in the moments when sharp words pass between them, that Cammie and JD love each other, but he'd thought it comfortable, tamed: the love of family, of friendship. The moment passing between them isn't tamed at all: it's a passion both deep and vast for all that it's subdued. Daniel can see no evidence that JD's preferences for male lovers, male bodies before and against him (something of which Daniel has resolved not to allow himself to think), are dampening the single-mindedness with which he has applied himself to Cammie's pleasure. 

Maybe that's the key, Daniel thinks. Maybe JD's desire (for desire it is, played out before him in action as clearly as though it were shouted from the rooftops) and JD's passion is not for Cammie's body, but for Cammie's _happiness_. Maybe JD's love for Cammie has led him to a place where he can set aside his own carnal preferences in favor of a cerebral pursuit made manifest through physical action. 

And in understanding that, something clicks into place for Daniel, the missing piece of this household he hadn't quite understood and hadn't noticed he was missing. He'd known that Cammie and JD are bound together by ties and commitments he can barely _perceive_ , much less understand, but this sharpens it, brings it into a focus so full of clarity it makes his heart hurt. There is nothing they would not do for each other. Nothing they would not give to each other. _Love is the condition in which someone else's happiness becomes essential to your own_ ; Daniel can't remember who said it. But this is the most pure manifestation of that definition he's ever seen.

Before him, Cammie's body shivers and tenses, rises and falls beneath JD's hands and JD's mouth, and Daniel can see that love threaded through every inch between them, from the way her fingers caress the curve of his skull so gently even as she pulls him more tightly against her to the way JD's hand, replaced against her clit by the worship of his lips and tongue, slides beneath her thigh and adjusts her position in fractional increments, relying on some unvoiced instinct to ensure her comfort and relieve her strain. Daniel can't tell whether her gasps and shudders herald orgasm, aftershock, or precursor, but he doesn't think it matters. Not with the way her whole body is quivering, her head thrown back, eyes shut and teeth buried in her lower lip, her face open and radiant. 

It's a long endless moment before Cammie's fingers slacken, trail limply from JD's hair down to his shoulder; one hand rises again to brush his hair out of his eyes for him, a mother's eternal instinct. JD takes that cue to pick up his head and sit back on his heels, and Daniel's torn among slipping silently away to cherish this moment he's been fortunate enough to experience, move in the shadows in order to have a better view, or stay frozen in place lest they realize he's there. Cammie lifts her head from where it had been lolling against the back of the chair, and smiles down at JD with a tenderness Daniel has seen but the barest fraction of in the daylight, away from this unity they've spun out between them. 

The flutter in Daniel's chest isn't jealousy. (He has nothing to be jealous of, he reminds himself. He's here on their sufferance.) Instead it is envy, so sharp and overwhelming it nearly spills into his other senses until he can see and taste the longing. Not for the physical -- he's never been a slave to his body's demands, a fact Jack had lamented loudly and only half-teasingly, even though never referring to his sexual appetite or lack thereof -- but for the emotion it reveals, the love and acceptance there, the state of cherishing and being cherished in return. He can't conceive of it. He can only barely recognize what it is that he sees.

"Empirical evidence suggests," JD says, resting the side of his cheek lightly against her thigh for a momentary respite, though his concentration upon her suggests that he hasn't yet taken his fill of pleasuring her. It takes Daniel a second to realize what he's referring to -- he is nowhere near as adept at picking up a conversation minutes or hours or days later as they both are, despite years of experience doing so with Jack -- 

He shies away from that thought with a practiced mental discipline even as Cammie laughs again, quicksilver through her efforts to stay quiet. "Do _not_ ," she says. Her voice has the rasp of breathlessness. "I just like it when people look at me an' like what they see. Doesn't happen often enough. Ain't a _kink_."

"Mmm," JD says, acknowledgement without agreement, punctuating his words with some fractional motion Daniel can only guess at by the way his biceps flex beneath the ink. Cammie's breath catches loudly on the inhale; her left thigh twitches, once, twice, and JD leans over to shift its position so absently Daniel thinks it might be unconscious. "Carl might disagree."

The stab of jealousy at the mention of the absent referrant is even more overwhelming for being unexpected. ( _What is Carl to she, or she to Carl_ , his brain demands to know; he hushes it.) In the time since he has moved into this household, Daniel has seen JD pursue both one-night stands and ongoing liaisons with equal fervor while Cammie's own behavior has been as modest as a nun's. He hadn't even considered the possibility Cammie might have a love life (beyond that which can be found inside these walls, that is, he amends his thought). He doesn't think he'll be considering it much now that he knows it, either.

"Can't help what other people decide to believe," Cammie says, as tart and proper as though they were in the church's vestry. She lets her head fall back against the back of the chair again, her expression lazy and replete. "I am a paragon of virtue." (They even argue in the middle of making love.)

"Mmm-hmm," JD says again, turning his head to mouth at the swell of her thigh where his cheek had been resting. "Which is why I'm fucking you on the living room chair instead of in that nice huge bed I spent so long building."

The noise Cammie makes in return is half frustration, half amusment. "Seems I recall --" JD's bicep flexes again; her words break off in mid-sentence, and Daniel curses the fact he can't see what it is JD is doing to her even as he curses his own lack of shame. (Oh God, he shouldn't be objectifying Cammie like this, but hadn't she just said --) "That _somebody_ \-- oh, _fuck_ \-- that _somebody_ in this room was the one to decide --"

She cuts herself off with a whimper, her hands going back to the arms of the chair, her fingers digging in sharply as her hips push up against JD's hand. JD's movements grow clearer, more pronounced; he lifts his head and shakes his hair out of his eyes with one quick practiced gesture, shifting his weight with the thoughtless assurance of someone whose body obeys his demands of it, leaning into each stroke of his fingers inside her with a casual, elegant grace. "Yeah?" he says, sober and serious, and Daniel can't see his face but he can tell by the sound of his voice that it's JD's hidden laughter. "You were saying?"

Daniel's breath catches in his throat again, because Cammie's response to that is to growl, deep and throaty, and the sound shoots straight through him. It takes root in the base of his stomach, in his biceps and his thighs; he can feel his penis filling, his skin heating, and the world around him gets a little sharper and a little more bright. Cammie's spine ripples again, her breasts (beautiful) arching even beyond the rise and fall of her gasps for breath, done in the same rhythm as the rhythm JD has set. "Bastard," she manages, her voice lingering half a heartbeat too long on the sibilant. "Can't win an -- argument so you gotta -- distract me --"

"Tell me I'm lying," JD says, and if Cammie's growl brought Daniel back to the reality of his body, something in JD's voice snaps him even further into the here-and-now, because he _knows_ that voice. Spent years obeying it, even if never in quite this context, even if he's never heard it from those lips. "Tell me you haven't spent nights lying in bed, touching yourself, fucking yourself, thinking about what would happen if Daniel walked in -- thinking about his eyes on you --"

Cammie makes a noise Daniel can't explain and can't identify -- not a whimper, not a growl, not a cry, but somehow something of all and none of them -- that Daniel can't quite hear through the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears, the stab of panic, of discovery, of shame. The only thing that keeps him from fleeing is the way his knees lock, and it takes a few extra seconds for common sense to reassert itself: neither of them know he is here, neither of them _could_ know he is here, if either of them knew he were watching they would have done something, said something, protested his intrusion, his inclusion in such a sacred moment --

\-- which means that JD's words are goad or truth or true-born fantasy --

JD shifts his weight on his heels, rocking now with the same pulse of his fingers rocking into Cammie, making love to her, his whole body narrowed down to that one point of penetration. His words twine through the space between them, punctuated by his own pauses for breath, too-frequent inhalations betraying his own involvement in the moment. "The way he'd watch you -- eat you up with his eyes, so fucking gorgeous, sweetheart, so beautiful when you let yourself give in to it, come on, sweetheart, almost there, just like that, and he'd watch you fuck yourself, watch the way you want it, watch your hips, watch your tits, watch your fingers on your clit and your fingers inside of you and the way you reach for it, the way you want it so bad, and he'd stand there and think how beautiful you are, how fucking gorgeous you are with your head all thrown back and your chest heaving like that, how much he wants to touch you, how much he wants to make you make those noises, how much he wants to be the one to make you make those noises, how much he wants to be the one fucking you --"

Daniel can't move, he can't even _think_ , and he can't tell if his thoughts are his own or if they're invoked by the sound of JD's words, JD's hypnotic voice leading him to his thoughts and conclusions with a familiar ease invoked by hours of meditation with JD his only guide. Except he can't imagine a universe in which JD's words are not truth, whole and entire, unforced, unfettered. Cammie _is_ beautiful -- her skin, her breasts, the line of her neck, the curve of her hip -- and he _does_ wish he could be the one making her make those sounds. Right now he can't think of anything he wouldn't do to have his hands on her skin, his mouth on her mouth -- to be the one to bring her that pleasure, to be the one to make her clutch at the arms of the chair and arch her back and throw back her head and hold her breath, freezing in place while JD drives into her with a force neither gentle nor tender, leaving her yearning, _reaching_ \--

Her climax ripples through her, pulling forth one long keening whine that goes straight through Daniel, turns his spine to liquid and makes his stomach flutter, his balls ache, his penis twitch inside its cotton prison. It lasts longer than he thought was even possible, and JD keeps his fingers moving roughly inside of her, keeps caressing her clit with his thumb, until Cammie's voice breaks on a sound that is half sob, half laughter. She gasps for breath, and Daniel marvels at the sight of her, flushed and panting, her hair standing on end from where she's been tossing her head back and forth against the chair's high back, pleasure written in her every line. She is beautiful. She is magnificent. She is unearthly in her splendor, vast and radiant, and Daniel is expecting JD to stop -- to allow her to recover, to allow her time to breathe --

"Come on, sweetheart," JD says, soft and low, the barest breath of encouragement, as he twists his fingers ceaselessly in their quest. His hands are the only point of contact between his skin and hers, but his whole body is leaning towards her, perched on his heels, focused on her with every fraction of his prodigious concentration. The rhythm he's set changes again -- becomes shorter, deeper, more focused, and this has gone far beyond what Daniel would think Cammie's body could bear, even despite the pleasure it clearly invokes, but Cammie's hips are slamming into each stroke, working herself against JD's fingers. 

"Come on, sweetheart," JD murmurs again. Cammie gives no sign of hearing; she's too far gone to pleasure. Daniel thinks JD may be using his voice to keep her anchored, keep her grounded, much in the same way he uses his voice as anchor and ground in the _zendo_ , and for much the same reason. Or maybe the words are for JD himself, to remind himself of the end goal, some goal Daniel can't see or comprehend but which JD seems to have firmly in sight. "Almost there. Almost there. Just let it go for me -- almost there, so close, just like that, I know you want it, all you have to do is take it -- go ahead, just take it, just like that --"

Daniel hadn't thought a woman's climax could be greater than what he's seen Cammie already succumb to, but the evidence before his eyes plays him false: he swears he can hear the chair creaking as Cammie freezes again, pushing herself up against the chair's arms, poised in that one eternal second of pleasure. As he watches (oh, God, he shouldn't, he shouldn't be here, he shouldn't be stealing this gift without it being freely given, but it's far too late for him to back away now), she throws back her head again, and this time the sound she makes is harsh, guttural, ripped from the pit of her stomach. She breathes -- freezes -- moans again, staccato beats rising up the scale -- and finally convulses, her whole body spreading outward from her center, bearing down into something so vast that Daniel has no words to observe it. All he can do is watch as she takes her fill, gives herself over to sensation, to the glorification of desire and joy. 

When she finishes coming with a bitten-off shout that surely would have woken him had he not already been awake, he finds himself slumped against the wall, as weak in the knees as though it had been his own climax, his breath resonating with hers even as his penis twitches again, so hard he can feel the ache starting to hook in behind his navel. Cammie sprawls in the chair, her legs splayed wide, her hands having fallen from where they had been clutching, her entire body limp and boneless. 

Daniel has no words for the picture she paints. There are none in any language he knows, of this world or any other.

JD's hands had stilled, with preternatural knowledge, the minute his touch would have crossed the line into being too much: as Daniel's world begins to widen from the sharp and narrow focus on Cammie's glory, he realizes that JD's skin is sheened with sweat as much as Cammie's is, if not more. Daniel can see the way JD's shoulders rise, fall, with the breaths JD is taking to center himself. As Daniel watches, JD relaxes his own taut control, slides sideways to rest his head against the arm of the chair, and Daniel can finally see Cammie's sex in all its glory: he watches, fascinated, as JD slides his fingers free. Cammie's hips follow his motions, despite her exhaustion, yearning after his touch; JD presses the backs of his knuckles against her for reassurance as soon as he withdraws, making wordless reassurances in answer to her equally-wordless protest. 

They breathe together, for a long sweet time, and Daniel finds his own breaths falling into the same pattern, until for one dizzying moment he feels as though he is _there_ , present between them, holding Cammie sweet and cherished against him in the same way JD is, as though JD's having conjured his presence with words has drawn him into the perfection of their togetherness. It feels -- 

It feels _right_. Dimly he knows that he should feel small and cold and shamed, for having the unforgiveable temerity to watch that which he had no right to see, but he can't. Not when it makes him feel like this, so full of boundless comfort, as though he could step forward and take his place in that moment and be welcomed as long as he approached them with tenderness and care. 

Oh, God, he can't risk it. He knows he can't. If he's wrong, he will have committed an unforgiveable sin, turned love and beauty to something squalid and a source of shame. But he _wants_. 

Eventually Cammie stirs, lifting her head, opening her eyes, clearing her throat; she winces slightly as she does, and JD is on his knees again in a flash, his hands solicitious against her thighs, soothing away the aches and twinges that surely must be making themselves known. "No fair using that against me," she says, her voice so raspy she sounds nothing and everything like herself. 

"Worked, didn't it? Truth always does," JD says, arrogant and unrepentant. (Daniel refuses to think about what those words might mean.) JD's thumb slides its way along the line of Cammie's muscles, and he follows it up with a feather-light kiss that makes her shiver. Or maybe it's the air, the chill setting in over sweat-warmed skin; JD pulls down her tank top for her, covering her magnificent breasts, and Cammie makes another soft noise of enjoyment. "You want ice water or Gatorade with your pills?"

Cammie exhales, sharp huff of breath, and in that one motion Daniel can feel them both picking back up the roles and realities they'd both set aside. "Gatorade," she says, but as JD starts to rock back on his heels to go fetch her a drink, she stirs, catches his wrist before he can go. "Not yet," she says. Daniel can hear some silent sorrow in her words, can tell by the line of JD's shoulders that he shares it. "Stay with me a minute more."

JD's back softens. "Always," he says, his voice a promise, and before Daniel can even blink, he straddles the arms of the chair: backwards, his thighs flexing as he holds the majority of his weight in place (with, it seems, nothing more than force of will), letting the barest fraction rest against Cammie's lap. He rests his forehead against Cammie's for a second, and Daniel's chest aches unexpectedly to see the familiar gesture, so far from its home. Then Cammie tips up her face, rubbing her cheek against his, and JD slides so that his knees tuck into the pockets between Cammie's thighs and the side of the chair. It has the motions of a practiced dance; Daniel can't tell which one of them moves to embrace the other first, but they wind up with Cammie's arms wrapped around JD's waist, JD's arms wound around Cammie's shoulders, with Cammie's face buried against his neck.

"Thank you," Cammie says, muffled against JD's skin, and Daniel gets the sense that she means something greater, more vast, than what has just transpired. 

One of JD's hands cradles her head against his neck, stroking her hair, so gently Daniel wonders if she can even feel it. It should be at odds with the force, the rapacity, with which he demanded response from her body mere moments ago. It isn't. Uneasy memory stirs ( _Oh, God, look at you -- I know what this is, I know what this is like -- you can get through it --_ ); he shoves it away. (Jack always knew how to handle the fragile things with care.) "Always," JD says again, his hair falling to shield them both. "Everything. Anything."

"Love you too," Cammie says. "Jackass."

JD laughs softly, his shoulders rippling with it. "Mule." He turns his head to nuzzle at her ear. "Bitch."

"Ass," Cammie says. " _Arrogant_ ass."

"Stubborn cow." None of their words have any heat behind them; the tender affection with which they are infused makes them into love-names, and for the first time Daniel realizes they always have been. It's a realization so powerful it rocks him in place, makes him want to hold it close like a precious jewel, examine it from all sides and facets until he can truly understand. He's been shown something it will take him so long to understand, the key to deciphering the alien language spoken in this household that only _sounds_ like one of his native tongues. 

Eventually, Cammie sighs, and the sound jolts Daniel out of contemplation and back to realization: of where he is, of where _they_ are, of the fact they (still) don't know they are being observed. "Gatorade," Cammie says; it has the sound of a shutting door. She draws back, just enough to nip at JD's jawline. "And I think I can sleep now."

JD laughs again. "You'd better," he says. "I refuse to admit I've lost my touch."

It's enough of a hint, enough of a warning, that Daniel can step back further into the shadows before JD starts to move. He calls on every inch of his practice at moving silently, every scrap of memory he hadn't realized he'd been saving up -- which floorboards creak, where the joists are, where to place his feet so as not to leave a hint of his passage -- to bear him safely back to his room. It's far enough away, and the house's acoustic design so good, that he only winces a little as he eases the door to his bedroom open, each tiny creak of wood and whine of hinge sounding like a gunshot in the cathedral of silence.

The door closed again behind him, he slumps bonelessly back against it, pressing the palm of one shaking hand hard against the erection that still hasn't started to wane. His mind is already sifting through what he's just seen, presenting him with still frames and snapshots -- the sounds -- Cammie, radiant and eager, spurred on to pleasure by JD's narration of phantom-Daniel's actions, observations --

He lifts a hand to his mouth, bites down hard against the meat of his palm at the base of his thumb to stifle the sound he wants to make. ( _They'll hear -- they'll know --_ ) The pain sparks behind his eyes, but fades, immediately. The desire won't go away with it. 

He feels unclean, thinking about touching himself to the sight of their lovemaking, but the minute he thinks that, he's held captive by the memory of JD's words, whispering through his ears: _tell me I'm lying, tell me you haven't spent nights lying in bed, touching yourself, fucking yourself, thinking about what would happen if Daniel walked in -- thinking about his eyes on you --_ He pushes himself away from the wall, his knees shaking, hearing Cammie's voice, raspy and tender and sated: _no fair using that against me_ ; he stumbles to the bed, letting his robe drop to the ground, his sweatpants follow, to the sound of JD's response. _Worked, didn't it? Truth always does._

There's lotion in his bedside table, was there when he moved in, and at the time he'd thought it just another example of the excellent hospitality the household's principals have provided so far, but now he's wondering if either of them had intended this very use, because he can't get his hands on it fast enough. Can't get his hands on _himself_ fast enough, thinking of Cammie, thinking of Cammie thinking of _him_ , the recollected vision of JD making love to her in the living room blending seamlessly behind his eyes into the fantasy JD had spun for Cammie's pleasure: his right hand grips the base of his penis, his left hand cradles his balls, and he can't help thinking of the way JD's hands had looked against Cammie's sex, those few bare glimpses he'd gotten -- the way JD had leaned into his motions, into Cammie's arching body -- the way JD's biceps had moved, smooth and gliding --

It doesn't take long for him to bring himself to climax, his heels planted against his bed, his back arching in unconscious imitation of how Cammie's spine had flexed, and once he does, he feels as limp and boneless and exhausted as Cammie had looked, even though his orgasm had been nowhere near as all-encompassing. His breath is harsh in his own ears as he falls back against his pillows, sticky and sated, relieved in some way extending -- curiously -- far beyond the physical. He waits for the guilt and shame to come sneaking back: for having watched, for having _stayed_ , for having been aroused by the sight, for using Cammie as an object of lust without her knowledge and without her consent. It doesn't -- quite -- come. ( _I like when people look at me and like what they see._ )

Too many things to think about. Too many realizations to process them all, and Daniel laughs, weakly, when he thinks that this is precisely the sort of thing he should bring to JD, to their meditation sessions together, in order to beg assistance in threading the complicated twists and turns of his own thoughts and emotions to win through them all and find the course of right action. Somehow he can't see doing that this time. _So, I was getting up to get a drink last night, and I happened to see --_

Yeah. No.

Still, he lies in his bed, his skin cooling as the air conditioning finally kicks in (twenty degrees warmer in here than it is out there, he'd swear), his heartbeat thundering in his chest, and he thinks that maybe he doesn't need the help. Thinks that the example he's been given all unknowing -- the example of love and care and tenderness and preference-transcending desire, the example of honesty both physical and emotional, the example of wanting and taking -- may be enough. Thinks that the old Daniel Jackson, the man he'd been when he'd first walked through these doors, would have panicked long ago, blundering and stumbling his way through mortified apologies and soul-killing shame, and that man never would have known what wonder he would have missed. 

He can't be sorry for having seen that. Even though he shouldn't have; even though he should have backed away, silent and unseen, and let them have their time together without the interference of outside eyes. Even though he should have given them their privacy. He can't regret it. Not when it had been the most perfect expression of love and beauty he's ever been able to see. Not when he knows, with those mysterious instincts that JD has spent so long trying to lure him into listening to, that his intrusion has brought him one step closer to _understanding_ , an understanding he can tell he won't fully reach without time and thought and effort but which is already, he thinks, starting to bloom in those silent spaces in the back of his mind where JD says all the important work gets done.

When sleep takes him, he barely realizes, and in the morning, Cammie looks at him and smiles.


End file.
